


Idle Musings

by Umpleby



Category: Star Trek: Picard
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:20:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 3,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23549050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Umpleby/pseuds/Umpleby
Summary: Drabbles, detours, idle daydreams. Little bits and pieces.
Relationships: Agnes Jurati/Cristóbal Rios, Raffi Musiker & Cristóbal Rios
Comments: 75
Kudos: 46





	1. Chapter 1

He doesn’t understand himself. 

He always thought he did.

He doesn’t understand why he rushed to her with his whole being when, small and alone, she faced Sutra.

He doesn’t understand why he schlepped all over Synthville looking for her afterwards.

Surely it was just a one-night stand?

Why can’t he let her be?


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ‘He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.’
> 
> \- Tolstoy, _Anna Karenina_

He comes upon _that_ little sequence in his wandering through Synthville. The one of Maddox kissing Agnes. It’s that same feeling of the only freighter crash he’s ever witnessed - it turned his stomach but he couldn’t look away.

He’s jealous. He’s heartbroken. He’s angry. He’s afraid.

All this over a flaky one-night-stand, _cabrón_ , he tells himself. You know she means nothing to you, you mean nothing to her.

Unbidden, there rises the memory of Agnes’ terrified face as Sutra approaches her. He clenches his fists. It all comes back, over and over, to the rot at the heart of their own society.

The tears well up for himself, and for her, but he has long practice in blinking them back.

Then a wave of compassion for what she’s lost, what she was forced to do, what she’ll have to live with for the rest of her days. Maddox and Vandermeer, Jana and The Flower.

And trailing all of these, skulking along at the back, the fear. The small quiet voice he’s trained himself to ignore is insistent: he loves her, against his will he loves even the way she fills the space around her. And one way or another, he’s going to lose her. There’ll be another Maddox, another Soong, someone more her kind than a rumpled freighter captain who was cashiered out of Starfleet because he couldn’t deal with his orders.

But there is that in him will not rest unless he is once more in her presence. And this thing has worn him down over weeks of near-constant struggle, so that both his sleeping and his waking are suffused by the awareness of her.

He drags his eyes away from the kiss frozen in time and presses on with his search.


	3. Get ready for it

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kingsman, Get Ready For It, in response to PMD’s songfic challenge.
> 
> With thanks to Cicak; I borrowed both her first sex scene of the two, and then her scene of Agnes and Cristobál making love in a spot of sunshine after they’ve saved the galaxy.

He carries her to the bed, warm and waiting in the full sunshine. She’s wound her legs round him and refuses to let go, until he buries his face in her ribs and tickles her.

Even in the midst of his lust, as he looks at her laughing, grabbing his fingers, trying to pull him down on top of her, a cold hand grips his heart, as he thinks of the look on her small face at Sutra’s touch. Will it always be this equation of trembling on the edge, this joy of having her equally and oppositely balanced by the fear of losing her?

_You said whatever you put out there  
Whatever you put out there is gonna come back_

But maybe she’s sought him out even after all the horrendous damage done to her, because he stayed true to what he felt. At some point, he can’t remember when, he’d stopped hiding from her. Maybe the tenderness of his heart was unsealed that night when Maddox died, when he remembered the man’s desperate whisper from the transporter pad; _Aggie, Aggie_. The look in his bloodshot eyes: as if seeing her face was worth all the torment he’d passed through.

 _You said whenever you are ready  
_ _Whenever you are ready just let it all out_

And she had let it all out, in the way she made for him like an unhesitating arrow, in the fierceness of her kiss. Their coupling that night had an acidity to it, a susurration as of knives being drawn close to hand, a gritty sirocco of emotion that threatened to bring him to tears when she mounted him. He tasted, in her thirst that night for oblivion, his own desperation after he’d shot the congealed blood and bones of Jana and The Flower into the void, and tucked Pops in the freezer, looking away from the new mouth open in the back of his head.

_And I know cos the enemy inside me  
Cos the enemy inside me is holding me back_

He had fought it with all his might, but she, she’d bounded up to him like a puppy and forced him to laugh at his so-tragic sense of life. She’d babbled on about the lack of holos, how bored she was in space, getting to the end of her research, but his ears had pricked up at that bit about watering his plants. He’d always loved keeping plants, he’d never been good at watering them, and his mother would tell him with that same half-laughing look, challenge in her eyes: _hijo, hoy día he regado tus flores, ¡pobrecitos!_

Against his will, her blond head backlit by the stars, she’d made him smile; his face twinged oddly while his mouth slowly remembered how to shape itself.

_But we know there's something in the silence  
There's something in the silence_

On the few quiet evenings they’d had on _La Sirena_ before Freecloud, he’d noticed the others gave him a wide berth at ship’s evening, when he sat in the captain’s chair and opened Unamuno, ready to chew on his cigar and his tragedy both: _Hasta que se llora de verás no se sabe si se tiene o no alma._

Except for her; she would occupy what he would always think of as _her_ seat on the bridge, reading while twining a curl round a finger, or fiddling quietly with her research models which hung glittering in the air, always keeping herself just out of his direct line of vision.

He tried a couple of pointed looks in her direction but she remained quietly absorbed and ignored all the unspoken instructions he sent her way to go on, go away, clear off. The silence would stretch thin until his teeth itched to break it, at which point she would uncannily make some innocuous sound - a sigh or a little hum - enough to calm the tension radiating from him towards the unknown threat she posed.

_Get ready for it  
Get ready for it  
You said there's only one place left to find  
Together we can save the world tonight _

Her skin was soft under his lips as he went on the hunt, a hunt for the centre of her being, that shy spot where the right incantation spoken under his breath would make her come undone beneath his mouth and questing fingers. When he reached it and heard her soft howls of pleasure and felt the spasms of her flesh, it made him feel for one moment as if he owned the quadrant and everything in it, and the next like a humble supplicant whose prayers had been answered beyond imagining.

_Get ready for it  
You said every life is a lesson  
Are you a fool or a Kingsman?  
Cos only you know _

For the longest time in an age he feels warm inside and out, the sun on his back and Agnes under him, trying to get close to him with every inch of her skin. All at once he gets the joke that life’s played on him, taking him down until it’s broken him, and in this instant building him up ready for the next downswing of the wheel. But the feel of it is no longer bitter in his mouth; he’s able to laugh along with it at his puny, fleeting existence. She has explained the joke with her body and her sighs and, in so doing, directed his gaze towards infinity, so that the skin he’s in disappears in a burst of colour, and only the sound of laughter remains.

_Hold on cos the volume is rising  
Yeah the volume is rising so you better hold on_

With her his climax is always a riot of storm-tossed sensation, a blur, a turning-out of himself, a cleansing. Will it always be like this, he wonders. The fifty-ninth time he makes love to her, the thousand and first? Will the sounds be the same, her cries, the stars seen through the window still appearing behind his eyelids? He’s loud this time as he fucks her, hard. The silky sunshine and the blue sky through the window above fill him with a joy that bursts out of him in sound as he comes, one solid hand on her breasts and the other tangled in her curls.

_I'll hold your hand  
With good intentions  
With good intentions  
I'll hold your hand_

She strokes him carefully, tracing the landscape of his body with her small fingers, smiling in satisfaction at some plane or curve that pleases her. He sees her, the sunshine showering her body and a look of wonder in her eyes as she takes him in. They stare at each other for long minutes, lost in each other. When he presses her for her thoughts, she confesses shyly that she finds him beautiful.

He puts his head on her breast, gingerly, aware of his weight, the weight of the past. She wraps her arms about him and holds his head close with one hand, the other hand reaching for one of his. She’s done this before, taken a hand and cradled it close. It makes him feel loved, safe, as if, at the end of all his wandering, he’s found home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cristobál’s mother: _Son, today I’ve watered your flowers, poor things!_
> 
> Unamuno: _Until you’ve truly cried, you don’t know if you have, or not, a soul._


	4. Sometimes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I swear this man just turns up in my head and writes himself; I just type what he tells me to on my phone.
> 
> Just a little something about his daydreams.
> 
> Writing them makes me happy 😊

He catches himself day-dreaming about her. Never mind that they’re on the same ship, and everyone’s fallen into a routine where they all gather once a day.

Never mind that she visits at night, now and again, less often than he would like, but he hasn’t found a way of telling her that.

Sometimes he finds himself in reverie, when there’s a spare half-hour where he pretends to be piloting the ship. Her face often appears before him then, her soft arms and her blinding smile when he makes her laugh. She laughs easily in his arms, always has done since that first dark, distant time.

Sometimes, when they are done, she lies with her head on his shoulder and one arm draped over him, lost in reverie.

He smokes his cigar, strokes her hair, and holds the weight of her close. 

He always watches for her to begin irritating him, but she never does. 

He promises solemnly he will never allow himself to build castles about the future; he’s lost too much to think about building something that he can’t bear to lose. His daydreams ignore him.

He notes the way she smooths her fingers over him, like he’s something infinitely precious. He see the wonder in her eyes and asks himself, why? What’s so special about this scarred, lived-in body, that she looks at it like it’s a bright horizon, a frontier full of promise?

He struggles with himself: he doesn’t want to let her close but he knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she is as close to him as the air he breathes. Not as necessary, he hastens to add, not nearly so.

Sometimes he is made uneasy by her simple and transparent adoration and he catches a part of himself looking round to see where this other man is, for surely she must be beaming at someone else. It can’t be him because he’s not - he’s not the hero of anyone’s romance. Past his first youth, solitary as a gormagander, constrained by his Starfleet habits, still rudderless in this new world, without family or money or reputation or position, at best an also-ran.

Still, he notes the familiar quiet triple tap at night, and she slides into the room, carefully shutting out the rest of them and smiling at him with the _snick_ of the latch. 

Then she climbs into the big bed with him and teases him about his paper book, and then some nights they kiss and go on kissing, and other nights they are content to drift off to sleep together, only to wake later and have their lips and tongues meet in the dark.


	5. Agnes, Evening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> High time I wrote something from Agnes’ point of view, given she’s my best girl.

Tomorrow night’s her retirement party: she’s got the dress and the matching shoes. The press will be carefully cordoned off. It’s not everyday that Earth’s premier synth scientist retires. 

It’s been a glittering career, but such a _long_ one. It’s no wonder she’s so very tired. 

She thinks back to the early days when she shot to the giddy heights of fame, nearly six decades ago now, when the synth planet was discovered. Oh yes, Coppelius.

It took two years before she was off the daily headlines, what with Starfleet exposing its dirty laundry, Oh’s machinations, (and that very much included the Maddox murder investigation) and the overturning of the synth ban.

A memory uncoils in her head - of someone she hasn’t thought of in a long time. Rios. Cristobál. A Good Samaritan during the most turbulent time of her life. And briefly, her lover.

She starts to smile as she remembers the sex, and how purely beautiful he was. She remembers the broad bed in that freighter - the _La_ something - and the mermaid figurines in a row on a force-fielded shelf. She’s always associated mermaids since with the sensations of post-coital sex, a heavy sleepiness filling her body and the smell of cigar smoke before they fell asleep together.

Those were good nights, and in a long life there should be nights like that, and she’s lucky to have had hers with someone who remains beautiful in memories that stretch back to more than half a lifetime ago.

She doesn’t know any more what’s become of him, and no doubt she or any of her assistants could find out, but, well, some sleeping dogs are best left to lie.

Soji occasionally visits, but with the tactful gentleness that is so much him, keeps his own counsel. He’s been in a male substrate for over two decades now. They’d published together, and travelled places together. She’s glad she still has a link to the old times through Soji, though she can’t quite remember the face he had during the drama at Coppelius.

Picard....gone now for four decades. Another one she’s lucky to have had a long and close association with. She chuckles to herself - one of her abiding memories of him was his embarrassing insistence on naming it the Jurati manoeuvre.

Raffi and Seven - those two made history. Probably would still be together in the flesh if Seven hadn’t succumbed to her degrading Borg implants. She hadn’t wanted a synth body but had chosen instead to download her memories into a substrate that sat an inch inside Raffi’s skull. Soji reported that Raffi had gotten drunk with Elnor after the procedure and woken up with a lurid tat on one of her breasts: Raffi + Seven 4ever. It made Agnes grin.

Another faint memory stirs. Cristobál had always liked her smile. She briefly considers looking him up and then shakes her head, no. Here, now, in her evening, the memory of cigar smoke and mermaids will have to see her through.


	6. Alpha Quadrant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another future for Cristobál and Agnes. Uneventful, joyous.
> 
> For PMD.

The computer on the _Vasco da Gama_ commed the First Officer, as he had requested. “Commander Rios. The _Hypatia_ is now docking.”

Cristobál tried to contain his impatience at the docking ring. Finally, at the end of the line, he spotted the two blond heads he was waiting for. As they stepped off the transport, the passenger manifest chimed softly: “Dr. Agnes P. Jurati, disembarked. Master Pablo Romet Jurati-Rios, disembarked.”

Pablo got to Cristobál before Agnes did.

When he returned to their quarters after his shift, he took in the scene from the doorway, struggling a little to believe that this was _his_ life. Agnes and Pablo were forming words out of hologrammatic letters on the rug; the little one was freshly bathed and in his pyjamas, ready for Cristobál to tuck him in. Dinner smelled like it was on its way.

Agnes bagged some lab space and set up her research, Pablo happily toddled off to nursery every day, Cristobál ran the science vessel _Vasco da Gama_ under the able captainship of a good man, and in the evenings they were content with one another’s company.

Agnes made little home movies of Cristobál and Pablo, which she sent to Raffi and Elnor and Soji. Raffi visited now and again; Pablo loved her lap and playing with her masses of hair.

Rios ran a happy ship; it was as quiet and uneventful as life on a starship could be. Everyone knew they could count on the Commander to be firm but fair, although he was a little on the soft side. Agnes kept herself very much to herself, but the captain liked her company and she was sometimes invited to tea (Earl Grey, hot).

Life in space in the alpha quadrant: Cristobál found he savoured every day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If it isn’t the Alpha Quadrant, I’ve buggered up majorly. Do let me know and I’ll fix it.
> 
>  _Romet_ means ‘joy’ in Estonian, a nod to Alison Pill’s heritage.


	7. Hope sprang eternal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Their first argument.

“Hold the fuck up, kiddo”, he says. “Where are you running to?”

She looks at where his hand’s caught her by the arm. “Kiddo?” She says, her voice low with fury. “Cristobál...really?”

He knows her well enough by now to know that it’s _Cristobál_ when she’s not in the best of moods, _mi amor_ when they’re making love, and _Ríos_ the rest of the time.  
“ _Dios mío_ , Agnes”, he says. “What the fuck are we even arguing about?” She’s breathing hard, flushed; her teeth are clenched.

Then the anger dies down as quickly as it came. “I’m...afraid”, she says, her voice flat and tired. “Afraid that you’ll go on some away mission - yes, I know, I know”, she shakes her head at his expression, “you’re the captain, you have to do your thing - duty. I know that. It’s just, it would be a lot easier if I didn’t care whether you lived or died. If I could say, oh, what a shame, he was a nice chap, where do I send the flowers?”

Each hand presses the other in turn, in a trembling rhythm. Her eyes are those of a child’s, huge, the tears starting to gather.

“I guess I think like a scientist”, she continues, “maxima, minima, optima, why send the captain when someone else could go? But then you’re not me, sometimes I think you’re so not me, and it’s unfair that you’re the one...the one I’ve become afraid to lose.”

He doesn’t know what to say. He would resent a womanish desire to control him and close off his avenues for action, but she’s just scared. He can’t remember the last time a lover was scared for him. It’s almost like, like he’s _important_ to her, like he _matters_ beyond the usual allowance of one night or a few days, when a female takes his fancy.

He’s scared too. He might start to look forward to coming _back_ from the more dangerous missions if it means seeing the look on her face when he’s arrives on the transporter pad in one piece, might have to change the habit of fourteen years where hope sprang eternal that an away trip _would_ go badly awry.

The only thing that he can think of to do is to wind her into his embrace, one arm around her fragile waist and a hand tangled in her soft curls.

He gets the feeling that if he said to her, sorry darling, we’ve had our day in the sun, she’d nod and accept it and shoulder her burdens and move right on, if that’s what he truly wanted. But as long as he keeps looking at her as if she matters to him, as long as he keeps inviting her to his bed, and playing her Sarah Vaughn songs when she’s there, and baking her _pan de pascua_ , and reading his paper books to her....it’ll break her if he doesn’t take care on something so chancy as an away mission.

She tries to pull away; he can feel the anger in her getting the upper hand again. He grips her tight and kisses her, hard. Now the tears are upon her cheeks, to be wiped away between kisses.

“I promise to take care, _cariño_ ”, he says. She nods into his chest, knowing that to promise more would be to become a liar, and he’s not that.

The sun comes in through one of the innumerable windows to silhouette them holding on to each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cristobál Ríos bakes. Fact.


	8. Cherry Blossom Sunshine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A story of my best girl, inspired by Data’s final journey.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Agnes, cherry blossom, sunshine, love: it doesn’t get much better than this.

Agnes knew one life had ended. She was in a place of golden light, perhaps an in-between place? She felt gossamer-light, gravity-defying, as if she were made of petals.

A sense of anticipation blossomed in her. Something good was going to happen. The sun flashed as if through cherry blossom, as if Here it always was her favourite time of year.

That was it! She was going to see the people she had loved in the life gone past! It was time, and she rushed forward, searching.

Cristobál materialised with the strength of the sun behind him, but no matter, she would know his outline anywhere. He was in black, like he’d been the first time she let him hold her face. They drew close together. He smiled at her and she felt herself beaming the radiance inside her at him.

She cupped his face in her hands, or perhaps it was just the desire to do so shining out of her, but it filled her with happiness. She could see it made him happy too. He covered her hands with his own, and his eyes were soft and tender, his smile was open and free, just like she remembered it used to be, sometimes, when he looked at her.

She could feel herself dissolving in the endless sunshine of that time and place, one mote at a time, on her way to the great unknown. Cristobál was there till the very end, when her last thought was borne away on the cherry blossom air, soft as a whisper.


	9. Excepting, of course, the sun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I keep being drawn to images of Cristobál and Agnes in the sunlight...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For siszx82, thank you for the awesome artwork of Cristobál and Agnes.
> 
> Check it out y’all: https://siszx.tumblr.com/post/615750554828849152/picard-doodle-agnes-and-crisjust-be-together

Cristobál lies on the floor in his quarters, testing the escape pod access. (He’s fanatical about every system on _La Sirena_ working flawlessly.) 

He looks up to see Agnes bearing coffee, sporting one of his frayed black button-down shirts, the sleeves massively rolled-up and the tails nearly down to her knees.

Cristobál smiles at her as he sets the coffee down carefully. As she turns away, he takes hold of an ankle, and having stopped her in mid-step, caught in a shaft of sunlight, he kisses her calves, the soft spots hidden behind her knees, the back of her thighs. 

Agnes catches her breath, blinks fiercely to hide the tears. 

She can’t remember whether anyone else has ever kissed her there. Excepting, of course, the sun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From Shaun Barbosa, _GPS_ :
> 
> “You kiss the back of my legs and I want to cry. / Only the sun has come this close, only the sun.”


End file.
